theStech/trainer_dataset · Datasets at Fast360

source stringclasses 3 values	answer stringlengths 0 156k	extra dict
book	121	null
book	In a version of the first step given by our foremost American Hegelian,52 we find this playing	null
book	with the necessary form of judgment. Pure being, he says, has no determinations. But the	null
book	having none is itself a determination. Wherefore pure being contradicts its own self, and so on. Why not take heed to the meaning of what is said? When we make the predication concerning pure being, our meaning is merely the denial of all other determinations than the particular one we make. The showman who advertised his elephant as ‘ larger than any	null
book	elephant in the world except himself’ must have been in an hegelian country where he was afraid that if he were less explicit the audience would dialectically proceed to say: ”This	null
book	elephant, larger than any in the world, involves a contradiction; for he himself is in the world, and so stands endowed with the virtue of being both larger and smaller than himself,—a perfect hegelian elephant, whose immanent self -contradictoriness can only be removed in a	null
book	higher synthesis. Show us the higher synthesis! We don’ t care to see such a mere abstract	null
book	creature as your elephant. ” It may be (and it was indeed suggested in antiquity) that all things	null
book	are of their own size by being both larger and smaller than themselves. But in the case of this elephant the scrupulous showman nipped such philosophizing and all its inconvenient conseq uences in the bud, by explicitly intimating that larger than any other elephant was all	null
book	he meant.	null
book	Hegel ’s quibble with this word other exemplifies the same fallacy. All ‘ others, ’ as such, are	null
book	according to him identical. That is, ‘otherness,’ which can only be predicated of a given thing A , secundum quid (as other than B, etc.), is predicated simpliciter , and made to identify	null
book	the A in question with B , which is other only secundum aliud,—namely other than A .	null
book	Another maxim that Hegelism is never tired of repeating is that “ to know a limit is already to	null
book	be beyond it.” “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” The inmate of the penitentiary shows by his grumbling that he is still in the stage of abstraction and of separative thought. The more keenly he thinks of the fun he might be having outside, the more deeply he ought to feel that the walls identify him with it. They set him beyond them secundum quid, in imagination, in longing, in despair; argal they take him	null
book	there simpliciter and in every way,—in flesh, in power, in deed. Foolish convict, to ignore his	null
book	blessings!	null
book	Another mode of stating his principle is this: “To know the finite as such, is also to know the	null
book	infinite. ” Expressed in this abstract shape, the formula is as insignificant as it is	null
book	unobjectionable. We can cap every word with a negative particle, and the word finished immediately suggests the word unfinished, and we know the two words	null
book	together.	null
book	But it is an entirely different thing to take the knowledge of a concrete case of ending, and to	null
book	say that it virtually makes us acquainted with other concrete facts in infinitum . For, in the first	null
book	place, the end may be an absolute one. The matter of the universe, for instance, is according	null
book	to all appearances in finite amount; and if we knew that we had counted the last bit of it, infinite knowledge in that respect, so far from being given, would be impossible. With regard to space , it is true that in drawing a bound we are aware of more. But to treat this little fringe	null
book	as the equal of infinite space is ridiculous. It resembles infinite space secundum quid, or in	null
book	but one respect,—its spatial quality. We believe it homogeneous with whatever spaces may remain; but it would be fatuous to say, because one dollar in my pocket is homogeneous with all the dollars in the country, that to have it is to have them. The further points of space are as numerically distinct from the fringe as the dollars from the dollar, and not until we have actually intuited them can we be said to ‘know’ them simpliciter . The hegelian reply is that	null
book	the quality of space constitutes its only worth ; and that there is nothing true, good, or	null
book	52 Journal of Speculative Philosophy, viii. 37.	null
book	122	null
book	beautiful to be known in the spaces beyond which is not already known in the fringe. This	null
book	introduction of a eulogistic term into a mathematical question is original. The ‘ true’ and the	null
book	‘false’ infinite are about as appropriate distinctions in a discussion of cognition as the good	null
book	and the naughty rain would be in a treatise on meteorology. But when we grant that all the worth of the knowledge of distant spaces is due to the knowledge of what they may carry in them, it then appears more than ever absurd to say that the knowledge of the fringe is an equivalent for the infinitude of the distant knowledge. The distant spaces even simpliciter are	null
book	not yet yielded to our thinking; and if they were yielded simpliciter , would not be	null
book	yielded secundum aliud, or in respect to their material filling out.	null
book	Shylock’s bond was an omnipotent instrument compared with this knowledge of the finite, which remains the ignorance it always was, till the infinite by its own act has piece by piece placed itself in our hands.	null
book	Here Hegelism cries out: “By the identity of the knowledges of infinite and finite I never	null
book	meant that one could be a substitute for the other; nor does true philosophy ever mean by	null
book	identity capacity for substitution.” This sounds suspiciously like the good and the naughty	null
book	infinite, or rather like the mysteries of the Trinity and the Eucharist. To the unsentimental mind there are but two sorts of identity,—total identity and partial identity. Where the identity is total, the things can be substituted wholly for one another. Where substitution is impossible, it must be that the identity is incomplete. It is the duty of the student then to ascertain the exact quid, secundum which it obtains, as we have tried to do above. Even the	null
book	Catholic will tell you that when he believes in the identity of the wafer with Christ’s body, he	null
book	does not mean in all respects, —so that he might use it to exhibit muscular fibre, or a cook	null
book	make it smell like baked meat in the oven. He means that in the one sole respect of nourishing his being in a certain way, it is identical with and can be substituted for the very body of his Redeemer.	null
book	‘The knowledge of opposites is one,’ is one of the hegelian first principles, of which the	null
book	preceding are perhaps only derivatives. Here again Hegelism takes ‘knowledge’ simpliciter ,	null
book	and substituting it for knowledge in a particular respect, avails itself of the confusion to cover other respects never originally implied. When the knowledge of a thing is given us, we no doubt think that the thing may or must have an opposite. This postulate of something opposite we may call a ‘knowledge of the opposite’ if we like; but it is a knowledge of it in only that one single respect, that it is something opposite. No number of opposites to a quality we have never directly experienced could ever lead us positively to infer what that quality is. There is a jolt between the negation of them and the actual positing of it in its proper shape, that twenty logics of Hegel harnessed abreast cannot drive us smoothly over.	null
book	The use of the maxim ‘ All determination is negation ’ is the fattest and most full-blown	null
book	application of the method of refusing to distinguish. Taken in its vague confusion, it probably	null
book	does more than anything else to produce the sort of flicker and dazzle which are the first mental conditions for the reception of Hegel’s system. The word ‘negation’ taken simpliciter is treated as if it covered an indefinite number of secundums , culminating in	null
book	the very peculiar one of self-negation. Whence finally the conclusion is drawn that assertions are universally self -contradictory. As this is an important matter, it seems worth while to treat	null
book	it a little minutely.	null
book	When I measure out a pint, say of milk, and so determine it, what do I do? I virtually make two assertions regarding it,—it is this pint; it is not those other gallons. One of these is an affirmation, the other a negation. Both have a common subject; but t he predicates being	null
book	mutually exclusive, the two assertions lie beside each other in endless peace.	null
book	123	null
book	I may with propriety be said to make assertions more remote still, —assertions of which those	null
book	other gallons are the subject. As it is not they, so are they not the pint which it is. The	null
book	determination “ this is the pint” carries with it the negation, —”those are not the pints.” Here	null
book	we have the same predicate; but the subjects are exclusive of each other, so there is again endless peace. In both couples of propositions negation and affirmation are secundum aliud:	null
book	this is a; this is n ’t not- a. This kind of negation involved in determination cannot possibly be	null
book	what Hegel wants for his purposes. The table is not the chair, the fireplace is not the cupboard,—these are literal expressions of the law of identity and contradiction, those principles of the abstracting and separating understanding for which Hegel has so sovereign a contempt, and which his logic is meant to supersede.	null
book	And accordingly Hegelians pursue the subject further, saying there is in every determination	null
book	an element of real conflict. Do you not in determining the milk to be this pint exclude it forever from the chance of being those gallons, frustrate it from expansion? And so do you not equally exclude them from the being which it now maintains as its own?	null
book	Assuredly if you had been hearing of a land flowing with milk and honey, and had gone there	null
book	with unlimited expectations of the rivers the milk would fill; and if you found there was but this single pint in the whole country,—the determination of the pint would exclude another determination which your mind had previously made of the milk. There would be a real conflict resulting in the victory of one side. The rivers would be negated by the single pint being affirmed; and as rivers and pint are affirmed of the same milk (first as supposed and then as found), the contradiction would be complete.	null
book	But it is a contradiction that can never by any chance occur in real nature or being. It can only	null
book	occur between a false representation of a being and the true idea of the being when actually cognized. The first got into a place where it had no rights and had to be ousted. But in rerum naturâ things do not get into one another’s logical places. The gallons first spoken of never say, “ We are the pint; ” the pint never says, “I am the gallons.” It never tries to expand; and so	null
book	there is no chance for anything to exclude or negate it. It thus remains affirmed absolutely.	null
book	Can it be believed in the teeth of these elementary truths that the principle determinatio	null
book	negatio is held throughout Hegel to imply an active contradiction, conflict, and exclusion?	null
book	Do the horse-cars jingling outside negate me writing in this room? Do I, reader, negate you? Of course, if I say, “ Reader, we are two, and therefore I am two, ” I negate you, for I am	null
book	actually thrusting a part into the seat of the whole. The orthodox logic expresses the fallacy by saying the we is taken by me distributively instead of collectively; but as long as I do not make this blunder, and am content with my part, we all are safe. In rerum naturâ, parts remain parts. Can you imagine one position in space trying to get into the place of another position and having to be ‘ contradicted ’ by that other? Can you imagine your thought of an	null
book	object trying to dispossess the real object from its being, and so being negated by it? The great, the sacred law of partaking, the noiseless step of continuity, seems something that Hegel cannot possibly understand. All or nothing is his one idea. For him each point of space, of time, each feeling in the ego, each quality of being, is clamoring, “ I am the all, —there is	null
book	nought else but me.” This clamor is its essence, which has to be negated in another act which gives it its true determination. What there is of affirmative in this determination is thus the mere residuum left from the negation by others of the negation it originally applied to them.	null
book	But why talk of residuum? The Kilkenny cats of fable could leave a residuum in the shape of	null
book	their undevoured tails. But the Kilkenny cats of existence as it appears in the pages of Hegel are all -devouring, and leave no residuum. Such is the unexampled fury of their onslaught that	null
book	they get clean out of themselves and into each other, nay more, pass right through each other,	null
book	124	null
book	and then “return into themselves” ready for another round, as insatiate, but as inconclusive, as	null
book	the one that went before.	null
book	If I characterized Hegel ’s own mood as hubris , the insolence of excess, what shall I say of the	null
book	mood he ascribes to being? Man makes the gods in his image; and Hegel, in daring to insult	null
book	the spotless sôphrosune of space and time, the bound-respecters, in branding as strife that law	null
book	of sharing under whose sacred keeping, like a strain of music, like an odor of incense (as Emerson says), the dance of the atoms goes forward still, seems to me but to manifest his own deformity.	null
book	This leads me to animadvert on an erroneous inference which hegelian idealism makes from	null
book	the form of the negative judgment. Every negation, it says, must be an intellectual act. Even the most naïf realism will hardly pretend that the non -table as such exists in se after the same	null
book	fashion as the table does. But table and non-table, since they are given to our thought together, must be consubstantial. Try to make the position or affirmation of the table as simple as you can, it is also the negation of the non- table; a nd thus positive being itself seems	null
book	after all but a function of intelligence, like negation. Idealism is proved, realism is unthinkable. Now I have not myself the least objection to idealism,—an hypothesis which voluminous considerations make plausible, and whose difficulties may be cleared away any day by new discriminations or discoveries. But I object to proving by these patent ready-made à priori methods that which can only be the fruit of a wide and patient induction. For	null
book	the truth is that our affirmations and negations do not stand on the same footing at all, and are anything but consubstantial. An affirmation says something about an objective e xistence. A	null
book	negation says something about an affirmation,—namely, that it is false. There are no negative predicates or falsities in nature. Being makes no false hypotheses that have to be contradicted. The only denials she can be in any way construed to perform are denials of our errors. This shows plainly enough that denial must be of something mental, since the thing denied is always a fiction. “The table is not the chair” supposes the speaker to have been playing with the false notion that it may have been the chair. But affirmation may perfectly well be of something having no such necessary and constitutive relation to thought. Whether it really is of such a thing is for harder considerations to decide.	null
book	If idealism be true, the great question that presents itself is whether its truth involve the	null
book	necessity of an infinite, unitary, and omniscient consciousness, or whether a republic of semi-detached consciousnesses will do,—consciousnesses united by a certain common fund of representations, but each possessing a private store which the others do not share. Either hypothesis is to me conceivable. But whether the egos be one or many, the nextness of	null
book	representations to one another within them is the principle of unification of the universe. To be thus consciously next to some other representation is the condition to which each representation must submit, under penalty of being excluded from this universe, and like Lord Dundreary’s bird ‘flocking all alone,’ and forming a separate universe by itself. But this is only a condition of which the representations partake ; it leaves all their other	null
book	determinations undecided. To say, because representation b cannot be in the same universe with a without being a’s neighbor ; that therefore a possesses, involves, or necessitates b, hide	null
book	and hair, flesh and fell, all appurtenances and belongings,—is only the silly hegelian all-or-	null
book	nothing insatiateness once more.	null
book	Hegel ’s own logic, with all the senseless hocus-pocus of its triads, utterly fails to prove his	null
book	position. The only evident compulsion which representations exert upon one another is	null
book	compulsion to submit to the conditions of entrance into the same universe with them—the conditions of continuity, of selfhood, space, and time—under penalty of being excluded. But what this universe shall be is a matter of fact which we cannot decide till we know what	null
book	125	null

book

121

null

book

In a version of the first step given by our foremost American Hegelian,52 we find this playing

null

book

with the necessary form of judgment. Pure being, he says, has no determinations. But the

null

book

having none is itself a determination. Wherefore pure being contradicts its own self, and so on. Why not take heed to the meaning of what is said? When we make the predication concerning pure being, our meaning is merely the denial of all other determinations than the particular one we make. The showman who advertised his elephant as ‘ larger than any

null

book

elephant in the world except himself’ must have been in an hegelian country where he was afraid that if he were less explicit the audience would dialectically proceed to say: ”This

null

book

elephant, larger than any in the world, involves a contradiction; for he himself is in the world, and so stands endowed with the virtue of being both larger and smaller than himself,—a perfect hegelian elephant, whose immanent self -contradictoriness can only be removed in a

null

book

higher synthesis. Show us the higher synthesis! We don’ t care to see such a mere abstract

null

book

creature as your elephant. ” It may be (and it was indeed suggested in antiquity) that all things

null

book

are of their own size by being both larger and smaller than themselves. But in the case of this elephant the scrupulous showman nipped such philosophizing and all its inconvenient conseq uences in the bud, by explicitly intimating that larger than any other elephant was all

null

book

he meant.

null

book

Hegel ’s quibble with this word other exemplifies the same fallacy. All ‘ others, ’ as such, are

null

book

according to him identical. That is, ‘otherness,’ which can only be predicated of a given thing A , secundum quid (as other than B, etc.), is predicated simpliciter , and made to identify

null

book

the A in question with B , which is other only secundum aliud,—namely other than A .

null

book

Another maxim that Hegelism is never tired of repeating is that “ to know a limit is already to

null

book

be beyond it.” “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” The inmate of the penitentiary shows by his grumbling that he is still in the stage of abstraction and of separative thought. The more keenly he thinks of the fun he might be having outside, the more deeply he ought to feel that the walls identify him with it. They set him beyond them secundum quid, in imagination, in longing, in despair; argal they take him

null

book

there simpliciter and in every way,—in flesh, in power, in deed. Foolish convict, to ignore his

null

book

blessings!

null

book

Another mode of stating his principle is this: “To know the finite as such, is also to know the

null

book

infinite. ” Expressed in this abstract shape, the formula is as insignificant as it is

null

book

unobjectionable. We can cap every word with a negative particle, and the word finished immediately suggests the word unfinished, and we know the two words

null

book

together.

null

book

But it is an entirely different thing to take the knowledge of a concrete case of ending, and to

null

book

say that it virtually makes us acquainted with other concrete facts in infinitum . For, in the first

null

book

place, the end may be an absolute one. The matter of the universe, for instance, is according

null

book

to all appearances in finite amount; and if we knew that we had counted the last bit of it, infinite knowledge in that respect, so far from being given, would be impossible. With regard to space , it is true that in drawing a bound we are aware of more. But to treat this little fringe

null

book

as the equal of infinite space is ridiculous. It resembles infinite space secundum quid, or in

null

book

but one respect,—its spatial quality. We believe it homogeneous with whatever spaces may remain; but it would be fatuous to say, because one dollar in my pocket is homogeneous with all the dollars in the country, that to have it is to have them. The further points of space are as numerically distinct from the fringe as the dollars from the dollar, and not until we have actually intuited them can we be said to ‘know’ them simpliciter . The hegelian reply is that

null

book

the quality of space constitutes its only worth ; and that there is nothing true, good, or

null

book

52 Journal of Speculative Philosophy, viii. 37.

null

book

122

null

book

beautiful to be known in the spaces beyond which is not already known in the fringe. This

null

book

introduction of a eulogistic term into a mathematical question is original. The ‘ true’ and the

null

book

‘false’ infinite are about as appropriate distinctions in a discussion of cognition as the good

null

book

and the naughty rain would be in a treatise on meteorology. But when we grant that all the worth of the knowledge of distant spaces is due to the knowledge of what they may carry in them, it then appears more than ever absurd to say that the knowledge of the fringe is an equivalent for the infinitude of the distant knowledge. The distant spaces even simpliciter are

null

book

not yet yielded to our thinking; and if they were yielded simpliciter , would not be

null

book

yielded secundum aliud, or in respect to their material filling out.

null

book

Shylock’s bond was an omnipotent instrument compared with this knowledge of the finite, which remains the ignorance it always was, till the infinite by its own act has piece by piece placed itself in our hands.

null

book

Here Hegelism cries out: “By the identity of the knowledges of infinite and finite I never

null

book

meant that one could be a substitute for the other; nor does true philosophy ever mean by

null

book

identity capacity for substitution.” This sounds suspiciously like the good and the naughty

null

book

infinite, or rather like the mysteries of the Trinity and the Eucharist. To the unsentimental mind there are but two sorts of identity,—total identity and partial identity. Where the identity is total, the things can be substituted wholly for one another. Where substitution is impossible, it must be that the identity is incomplete. It is the duty of the student then to ascertain the exact quid, secundum which it obtains, as we have tried to do above. Even the

null

book

Catholic will tell you that when he believes in the identity of the wafer with Christ’s body, he

null

book

does not mean in all respects, —so that he might use it to exhibit muscular fibre, or a cook

null

book

make it smell like baked meat in the oven. He means that in the one sole respect of nourishing his being in a certain way, it is identical with and can be substituted for the very body of his Redeemer.

null

book

‘The knowledge of opposites is one,’ is one of the hegelian first principles, of which the

null

book

preceding are perhaps only derivatives. Here again Hegelism takes ‘knowledge’ simpliciter ,

null

book

and substituting it for knowledge in a particular respect, avails itself of the confusion to cover other respects never originally implied. When the knowledge of a thing is given us, we no doubt think that the thing may or must have an opposite. This postulate of something opposite we may call a ‘knowledge of the opposite’ if we like; but it is a knowledge of it in only that one single respect, that it is something opposite. No number of opposites to a quality we have never directly experienced could ever lead us positively to infer what that quality is. There is a jolt between the negation of them and the actual positing of it in its proper shape, that twenty logics of Hegel harnessed abreast cannot drive us smoothly over.

null

book

The use of the maxim ‘ All determination is negation ’ is the fattest and most full-blown

null

book

application of the method of refusing to distinguish. Taken in its vague confusion, it probably

null

book

does more than anything else to produce the sort of flicker and dazzle which are the first mental conditions for the reception of Hegel’s system. The word ‘negation’ taken simpliciter is treated as if it covered an indefinite number of secundums , culminating in

null

book

the very peculiar one of self-negation. Whence finally the conclusion is drawn that assertions are universally self -contradictory. As this is an important matter, it seems worth while to treat

null

book

it a little minutely.

null

book

When I measure out a pint, say of milk, and so determine it, what do I do? I virtually make two assertions regarding it,—it is this pint; it is not those other gallons. One of these is an affirmation, the other a negation. Both have a common subject; but t he predicates being

null

book

mutually exclusive, the two assertions lie beside each other in endless peace.

null

book

123

null

book

I may with propriety be said to make assertions more remote still, —assertions of which those

null

book

other gallons are the subject. As it is not they, so are they not the pint which it is. The

null

book

determination “ this is the pint” carries with it the negation, —”those are not the pints.” Here

null

book

we have the same predicate; but the subjects are exclusive of each other, so there is again endless peace. In both couples of propositions negation and affirmation are secundum aliud:

null

book

this is a; this is n ’t not- a. This kind of negation involved in determination cannot possibly be

null

book

what Hegel wants for his purposes. The table is not the chair, the fireplace is not the cupboard,—these are literal expressions of the law of identity and contradiction, those principles of the abstracting and separating understanding for which Hegel has so sovereign a contempt, and which his logic is meant to supersede.

null

book

And accordingly Hegelians pursue the subject further, saying there is in every determination

null

book

an element of real conflict. Do you not in determining the milk to be this pint exclude it forever from the chance of being those gallons, frustrate it from expansion? And so do you not equally exclude them from the being which it now maintains as its own?

null

book

Assuredly if you had been hearing of a land flowing with milk and honey, and had gone there

null

book

with unlimited expectations of the rivers the milk would fill; and if you found there was but this single pint in the whole country,—the determination of the pint would exclude another determination which your mind had previously made of the milk. There would be a real conflict resulting in the victory of one side. The rivers would be negated by the single pint being affirmed; and as rivers and pint are affirmed of the same milk (first as supposed and then as found), the contradiction would be complete.

null

book

But it is a contradiction that can never by any chance occur in real nature or being. It can only

null

book

occur between a false representation of a being and the true idea of the being when actually cognized. The first got into a place where it had no rights and had to be ousted. But in rerum naturâ things do not get into one another’s logical places. The gallons first spoken of never say, “ We are the pint; ” the pint never says, “I am the gallons.” It never tries to expand; and so

null

book

there is no chance for anything to exclude or negate it. It thus remains affirmed absolutely.

null

book

Can it be believed in the teeth of these elementary truths that the principle determinatio

null

book

negatio is held throughout Hegel to imply an active contradiction, conflict, and exclusion?

null

book

Do the horse-cars jingling outside negate me writing in this room? Do I, reader, negate you? Of course, if I say, “ Reader, we are two, and therefore I am two, ” I negate you, for I am

null

book

actually thrusting a part into the seat of the whole. The orthodox logic expresses the fallacy by saying the we is taken by me distributively instead of collectively; but as long as I do not make this blunder, and am content with my part, we all are safe. In rerum naturâ, parts remain parts. Can you imagine one position in space trying to get into the place of another position and having to be ‘ contradicted ’ by that other? Can you imagine your thought of an

null

book

object trying to dispossess the real object from its being, and so being negated by it? The great, the sacred law of partaking, the noiseless step of continuity, seems something that Hegel cannot possibly understand. All or nothing is his one idea. For him each point of space, of time, each feeling in the ego, each quality of being, is clamoring, “ I am the all, —there is

null

book

nought else but me.” This clamor is its essence, which has to be negated in another act which gives it its true determination. What there is of affirmative in this determination is thus the mere residuum left from the negation by others of the negation it originally applied to them.

null

book

But why talk of residuum? The Kilkenny cats of fable could leave a residuum in the shape of

null

book

their undevoured tails. But the Kilkenny cats of existence as it appears in the pages of Hegel are all -devouring, and leave no residuum. Such is the unexampled fury of their onslaught that

null

book

they get clean out of themselves and into each other, nay more, pass right through each other,

null

book

124

null

book

and then “return into themselves” ready for another round, as insatiate, but as inconclusive, as

null

book

the one that went before.

null

book

If I characterized Hegel ’s own mood as hubris , the insolence of excess, what shall I say of the

null

book

mood he ascribes to being? Man makes the gods in his image; and Hegel, in daring to insult

null

book

the spotless sôphrosune of space and time, the bound-respecters, in branding as strife that law

null

book

of sharing under whose sacred keeping, like a strain of music, like an odor of incense (as Emerson says), the dance of the atoms goes forward still, seems to me but to manifest his own deformity.

null

book

This leads me to animadvert on an erroneous inference which hegelian idealism makes from

null

book

the form of the negative judgment. Every negation, it says, must be an intellectual act. Even the most naïf realism will hardly pretend that the non -table as such exists in se after the same

null

book

fashion as the table does. But table and non-table, since they are given to our thought together, must be consubstantial. Try to make the position or affirmation of the table as simple as you can, it is also the negation of the non- table; a nd thus positive being itself seems

null

book

after all but a function of intelligence, like negation. Idealism is proved, realism is unthinkable. Now I have not myself the least objection to idealism,—an hypothesis which voluminous considerations make plausible, and whose difficulties may be cleared away any day by new discriminations or discoveries. But I object to proving by these patent ready-made à priori methods that which can only be the fruit of a wide and patient induction. For

null

book

the truth is that our affirmations and negations do not stand on the same footing at all, and are anything but consubstantial. An affirmation says something about an objective e xistence. A

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negation says something about an affirmation,—namely, that it is false. There are no negative predicates or falsities in nature. Being makes no false hypotheses that have to be contradicted. The only denials she can be in any way construed to perform are denials of our errors. This shows plainly enough that denial must be of something mental, since the thing denied is always a fiction. “The table is not the chair” supposes the speaker to have been playing with the false notion that it may have been the chair. But affirmation may perfectly well be of something having no such necessary and constitutive relation to thought. Whether it really is of such a thing is for harder considerations to decide.

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If idealism be true, the great question that presents itself is whether its truth involve the

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necessity of an infinite, unitary, and omniscient consciousness, or whether a republic of semi-detached consciousnesses will do,—consciousnesses united by a certain common fund of representations, but each possessing a private store which the others do not share. Either hypothesis is to me conceivable. But whether the egos be one or many, the nextness of

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representations to one another within them is the principle of unification of the universe. To be thus consciously next to some other representation is the condition to which each representation must submit, under penalty of being excluded from this universe, and like Lord Dundreary’s bird ‘flocking all alone,’ and forming a separate universe by itself. But this is only a condition of which the representations partake ; it leaves all their other

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determinations undecided. To say, because representation b cannot be in the same universe with a without being a’s neighbor ; that therefore a possesses, involves, or necessitates b, hide

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and hair, flesh and fell, all appurtenances and belongings,—is only the silly hegelian all-or-

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nothing insatiateness once more.

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Hegel ’s own logic, with all the senseless hocus-pocus of its triads, utterly fails to prove his

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position. The only evident compulsion which representations exert upon one another is

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compulsion to submit to the conditions of entrance into the same universe with them—the conditions of continuity, of selfhood, space, and time—under penalty of being excluded. But what this universe shall be is a matter of fact which we cannot decide till we know what

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